The Poetry of John Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Yeager, R. F. "
- Title
- The Poetry of John Gower.
- Published
- Yeager, R. F. "The Poetry of John Gower." In Corinne Saunders, ed. A Companion to Medieval Poetry. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell; 2010. Pp. 476-95.
- Review
- It is no news to Gowerians that R. F. Yeager values Gower's poetry, but this essay articulates why he thinks everyone should do so, summarized in his closing comment: "what ought to distinguish Gower the Poet, with his fluency in three languages, Italianate ambition and, as his output suggests, indefatigable energy, is his repeated insistence in work after work that poetry should serve society. Poetry should make things better. If a poet fulfilled his role well--and readers read with care--then poetry probably did" (492). Yeager neither ignores nor shrugs off comparison with Chaucer--that recurrent motif of much Gower criticism and commentary--but opens it out at points to comparisons with Dante, with Langland, and with Milton, and uses these comparisons to establish the depth of Gower's desire for lasting poetic fame ("Italianate ambition"), his audience awareness, his social politics, and his multiple voices (trilingualism, "vox populi," "vox clamantis," open "speak[ing] to power" [487], "English vocal range" [491], etc.). Yeager considers form as meaning in Gower's three major works and in a range of less frequently considered ones: "In Praise of Peace," "Cinkante Balades" XLIII, and, from among the shorter Latin poems, "Quicquid homo scribat," "Est amor," "Ecce, patet tensus," and the possibly spurious "Eneidos bucolis." In these readings, Yeager attends to Gower's biography, linguistic subtleties, narrative and prosodic techniques, sources, historical contexts, critical traditions, and more. Notable, too, are Yeager's recurrent enlivening glimpses of Gower as a person when, for example, "[i]magining Gower imagining" his audience before taking "quill or stylus in hand" (481), when observing moments of personal sorrow and "grace" (486) in Gower's Latin lyrics, or when showing that "even when harnessed for service most public poetry was, for Gower, a living means of self-expression as well" (487). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2010
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
Biography of Gower
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations